Mark Finkle

Context-switching is not just a buzz word. It's something that is integral to successful agency work. Not hiring engineers with this in mind can be a huge problem. The smartest CTO -- and now technical recruiting whiz -- I know has some big thoughts on this, questions to ask to find these unicorns and red flags to keep an eye out for during the interview process. If you need to grow your team, this is a must read as Jason Trobman has successfully hired and placed hundreds of engineers. https://lnkd.in/d9mKKNGw

10

2 Comments

Great post by Aleix Morgadas and Eugene Sergueev on how Flo Health Inc. revamped mobile onboarding If you’re keen to learn how to: 🔹 break out of release-cycle bottlenecks with server-driven architecture 🔹 scale experimentation without scaling engineering effort 🔹 build internal platforms that empower teams across product, design and content …it’s well worth a read: https://lnkd.in/emiqM7NM

6

Claude Code Agent Teams will introduce agent orchestration to the masses. This is a good thing. Agent orchestration adds another gear entirely and devs are going to be floored by how fast Clause Code will shred their work. They’re also going to learn a few more things. It’s expensive. The ride is a joy. But it’s expensive. They’ll have to start learning to judge when to use it and when not. Claude Code will help here but expect early adopters to be calling out for more budget. It needs ready work. Teams are going to need a lot of work if they are going to use the new top gear. We are now past the point where execution is the bottleneck. Business decisions, design and infrastructure are now pace setting. It’s lonely in an F1 car. The car can go at speeds never previously imagined. But it only has one seat. Coordination with other devs becomes a real problem. Putting a dozen F1 cars, with rookie drivers, on the same track creates traffic jams. Weak teams will blame the cars and drive slower. Strong ones will build more racetracks and live at top speed. It’s complicated. Orchestration feels like an entirely new skilll above and beyond single threaded Claude Code. Expect a new learning curve here. A lot of devs aren’t ready for it. With orchestration now emerging, we are into the final stage of Yegge’s framework; Agent Fleets are here. That means we need a new playbook to guide us. Excited to read it.

28

2 Comments

3 reasons why we build software and service as one team: We don’t build tech *for* operations at Tandem. We build tech *with* operations. Here’s why that matters; 1) Fix friction at the root. If a vet has to click 5 times to do something that should take one, we fix it. Not just because it’s “inefficient”. But because it creates cognitive load, slows care delivery, and compounds under pressure. Less friction = faster throughput, fewer errors, and lower burnout. 2) Close the loop between builders and users. The person who writes the feature talks directly to the person who uses it. That means issues surface faster, fixes are more accurate, and nobody ships something that “technically works” but operationally fails. It’s not just “faster iteration” - it’s tighter alignment with reality. 3) Scale the system, not the sprawl. New clinics, new roles, new workflows. We don’t layer on SaaS duct tape. We evolve a system designed to flex with operational growth. That means fewer integration points, tighter control, and a consistent experience from core to edge. We don’t treat tech like a layer. We treat it like a nervous system. Because when you’re delivering care in the real world, you can’t afford delay, dissonance, or dropped signals. That’s why we built Tandem the way we did: One system. One team. Zero silos. Because when service and software evolve together, the whole organism gets smarter, faster, and stronger over time. ------------- Hi, I’m Doug. I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Tandem. We’re engineering the backbone for modern pet care. Follow me for posts on: * How we build tech with ops, not for them * How we build tech tools that scale cleanly * Scaling hybrid companies without SaaS bloat

27

2 Comments

Several people know about this problem but nobody talks about how to solve it. I was asked one time to help fix this issue at a company. The fix lies in breaking the work down to a few critical steps. First, never just hand off work in its entirety and expect you'll get anything you can use. Regardless of how good or bad the team is, always ask, always, the offshore team to pseudo code their approach. They should explain which files they'll touch, which systems they'll touch, integrations, which areas or layers of the application, etc. I call this the first pass. Why is this important? This tells me they're thinking about the problem right and if there are any gaps in their understanding, or any pieces they're missing. After that, they'll do a second pass. That is stubbing out which functions or code will need to be added or modified, maybe even making the functions and service calls work but with mock data. This is the "prove it to me" moment. This second pass also helps me as a dev manager gauge how fast or slow the offshore team is working, giving me indications too if they're stuck somewhere. Only after this second pass, do I actually turn them loose to go execute and "deliver" the solution. Only now, because I did some diligence on my managerial end, I've got greater confidence that what I'll get will be something on par with what I'm expecting and can use. This partnership and collaborative arrangement also fosters trust and over time the offshore team will learn how your organization operates, critical thinking, and that nothing should ever be done in a vacuum or cowboy way. For more helpful tips like this, follow me. I'm paying it forward in 2026 and will be sharing gems most people aren't talk about with a focus on the solutions, not just problems.

1

Product Ops: The Role We’ve All Been Doing (Without the Title) While Product Ops officially hit the mainstream around 2018, most of us have been doing the work for a decade. If you’ve ever built a feedback loop, audited a tech stack, or standardized a roadmap template to keep a team from spiraling—you were doing Product Ops. The core goal isn't just "organizing." It’s scaling the engine. Product Ops exists to remove the friction between having a strategy and executing it. Why PMs Must Be "Ops-Minded" Even with a dedicated Ops team, every great Product Manager must master these skills. You can’t build a world-class product on a broken foundation. To be an effective PM, you must: • Own the Data: Don't just look at metrics; build the systems to track them. • Refine the Process: If your sprint ceremonies are a mess, your product will be too. • Bridge the Gaps: Act as the "connective tissue" between Sales, Engineering, and the Customer. Whether it’s your formal title or 20% of your daily grind as a PM, operational excellence is what separates "shipping features" from "scaling a business."

9

2 Comments

Hot take: A massive backlog isn’t customer-centric. It’s indecision made visible. If you’re listening to the market, framing problems clearly, tying work to a 24–36 month ROI, and shipping an MVP with iterative releases, why is there still a backlog? Who is letting monetizable work get deprioritized? Isn’t the ideal state no backlog? What a big backlog actually signals: 🧭 Strategy fog - no sharp outcomes, so everything “might” matter. 💸 Monetization later - willingness-to-pay isn’t a gate, it’s a hope. 🧲 Pet projects - loudest voice wins, not the ROI. 🏭 Feature factory - output over outcomes. 🏦 Project funding - one-offs instead of durable product bets. 🧽 Never-delete culture - ideas pile up because no one says “no.” ⏳ No cost-of-delay math - urgency is a vibe, not a number. The ideal state: no traditional backlog. Replace it with a 90-day option pool. If an item can’t credibly start within 90 days, it goes to an Idea Bank you are proud to prune. How to run it: 🎯 Set three outcome themes for the quarter, with explicit “won’t do” statements. 💵 Tag every item as Monetize, Retain, or Protect and make Monetize the tie-breaker. 📈 Quantify cost of delay weekly and sort by ROI within 24–36 months. 🧪 Ship MVP → iterative releases with clear exit/scale criteria at each gate. 🧹 Enforce WIP limits and purge anything older than 90 days. 🛑 Keep a public kill list with the reason each idea lost. 🧯 Reserve capacity guardrails (e.g., 50% growth, 25% reliability/debt, 15% compliance, 10% discovery). 🗣 Validate with real buyers before entering “Now/Next.” 🔁 Re-prioritize on a fixed weekly cadence, not in ad-hoc fire drills. Backlog bloat is product debt. Clean it weekly. Your customers will feel it in cycle time, outcomes, and revenue. PMs are accountable for all their product outcomes - financial impact, adoption, savings, a clear value prop, increased bookings, and more. Disagree? Convince me why your backlog helps customers.

7

4 Comments

The bottleneck has shifted. AI has democratized execution. Anyone can ship code faster than ever before. But speed without clarity is just faster chaos. The engineers winning right now aren’t the best coders - they’re the best thinkers. They write crisp product requirements. They know that feeding an AI vague instructions gets vague results. The new superpower isn’t writing code. It’s writing context. Quality thinking → quality specs → quality output. Last week at the Anthropic Builder Summit in Bengaluru, I heard this same insight from multiple startup founders. And at Innovaccer, we’ve been living this principle ourselves. This isn’t theory. It’s the new reality of software engineering. Welcome to the new software stack!

140

3 Comments

For years, a specific PMS vendor (that I won’t name) chose not to embrace partnerships. The belief was simple: internal product teams could build everything faster, better, and capture more margin by keeping everything in-house. But software ecosystems don’t work that way. Big Ego does. DSOs and providers don’t just buy a product. They don’t care about your ego. They buy into an ecosystem, an environment where partners, integrations, and specialized solutions continuously expand what the platform can do. When that ecosystem doesn’t exist, the platform slowly becomes isolated. And over time, isolation tends to show up in the numbers. Today, we’re starting to see signs that platforms without strong ecosystems struggle to retain customers as practices look for more flexibility and integrations. A healthy ecosystem evolves, adapts, and creates value through collaboration. Without it, the platform slowly loses relevance. Without it, the platform slowly loses relevance. Nature at its best, just happening in the PMS world. 🌿 To all of you out there thinking PMS partnerships are dead, history is proving the opposite. And nature has proven it for billions of years. Customers are showing just how valuable a strong ecosystem really is. When a PMS tries to do everything internally and shuts the door on partners, the platform slowly becomes less adaptable, less innovative, and ultimately less valuable to the practices that depend on it. Hopefully other PMS leaders don’t repeat the same mistake. Why? Because AI is about to change the rules. Very soon (end of 2026), PMS migrations that used to take months will take minutes. When switching costs collapse, the ecosystem around a platform becomes one of the few true moats left. Factor HTI-5 (which has been largely absent from conference discussions so far) and the power shifts completely to the provider, not the PMS, not the payer, not the supply company. The lesson is simple: Platforms that embrace partners will grow stronger. Platforms that isolate themselves will struggle to keep customers. As in nature, history tends to repeat itself, especially in technology. And for those dreaming that AI will do everything in your PMS, it may be worth simplifying the assumption. In many ways, technology follows the same patterns as nature, and human systems rarely become fully autonomous.

8

3 Comments

Why neutrality in #SoftFurnishings is harder than boldness (And why I’ll always choose it.) 1️⃣ Neutral isn’t minimal. People often confuse neutral palettes with playing safe. But designing a neutral space that feels complete takes far more restraint than going bold. It’s easy to fill a room with colours and patterns. Much harder to know when to stop. 2️⃣ It takes discipline to edit. When clients see an empty corner, their first instinct is: “Let’s add something.” My job is to pause, feel the energy, and ask, “Does the space need more? Or are we avoiding stillness?” #HealingSpaces often breathe through the things we remove. 3️⃣ Quiet choices hold deeper power. A soft textured rug or a muted sheer aren’t background details. They are anchors. They guide the way you feel, move, and think. 4️⃣ Neutrality requires deep listening. Not just to the client, but also to the space. The walls. The light. The emotional weight of what already exists. If you listen carefully, you’ll often realise: The space always says something. You just need to honour it. 5️⃣ Bold is easy, but balance is tricky. Using statement colours is easy.  It takes a calibrated mind to design a space that feels peaceful and subtle. That is what makes neutral spaces feel timeless. Not boring, but deeply human. 💬 Have you ever walked into a room and felt instantly calm, without knowing why? *********** 🏡 Follow Darsha Manek for more on Soft Furnishings. *********** #LuxuryDesign #Entrepreneurship #EnergeticAlignment #Fabrics #Trends #HealingSpaces #SoftFurnishing

13

Product Ops POV A Product Ops lesson I was reminded of while facilitating a cross‑functional working session this week: Teams don’t struggle to come up with solutions. They struggle to clearly name the problem. We started the day with a structured exercise designed to surface the things people see, feel, or quietly work around—but don’t always say out loud. The rule was simple: name the issue, not the fix. And almost immediately, human nature showed up. Instead of stating the problem, people jumped straight to: “We should…” As the facilitator, I kept stopping the group and pushing them back: 👉 What’s the actual problem? 👉 Say it without proposing a solution. That constraint was uncomfortable. It slowed things down. And it made the work better. By forcing ourselves to capture clean problem statements, we had something solid to work with later. When we shifted to the afternoon, we didn’t invent objectives from scratch—we clustered the morning’s problems into themes. Those themes became our objectives. And many of the key results came directly from the original problem statements, just reframed as outcomes. Being able to connect those dots in real time as a team was genuinely energizing. What started as scattered frustration turned into clarity—clarity on purpose, confidence in the operating model, and belief in the system we built together. This is the part of Product Ops work I care most about: creating enough structure to slow teams down at the right moment, so they can move forward with intent instead of noise. Takeaway: If you want better solutions, don’t rush alignment. Get precise about the problem first. #productops #leadership #facilitation #operatingmodels #teamwork #systems

45

5 Comments

I love thinking about how decisions are made and how to empower teams to own their decisions. I've been working on standing up an Architecture Advice Process based on Andrew Harmel Law's Facilitating Software Architecture and applying strategies and tactics I've learned from others (Peter Hunter / Elena Stojmilova / Luca Mezzalira). Below is one of my favorite representations of how this affects decentralization and speed. What I've noticed is that within each team, the other decision-making models still apply. Each team will find itself somewhere on the curve, but scoped to its context. What I find interesting about this, as someone trying to facilitate and encourage using the process across teams sitting at different places, is that where the team is placed on the curve might indicate how willing they are to engage with the process. As a team moves from the top left to the bottom right, how might they feel about changing how they work? I'm really curious what others are seeing.

32

8 Comments

If you’re a CEO/founder or PE operator and your tech org is: ❌ Shipping late ❌ Stuck in reactive mode ❌ Struggling through the Series A/B jump, or post-acquisition integration or after a major release It’s not “a delivery problem.” It’s an operating model problem. At the inflection point, the old playbook breaks: what worked at 10 engineers fails at 40… and breaks again across multiple products/teams. That’s where I come in as a fractional CTO: - Spot platform and delivery risks before they hit revenue and retention - Rebuild execution rituals (prioritization, ownership, release confidence) without derailing the roadmap - Align architecture + team structure to your value-creation plan (growth, margin, or exit timeline) If you’re feeling the strain of growth, I can help you turn “busy and reactive” into predictable shipping, and a platform that scales. #CTO #SaaS #StartupScale #PrivateEquity #TechStrategy

8

3 Comments